NINE
I attended a dance upon its last song. The steps were well governed, though the tempo seemed wrong. And black knives speared forth from platters of service, their handles in fists of misguided observance.
It was an orca show at a theme park too small to accommodate such magnificent beasts. The tank didn’t seem quite long or wide enough. Bench seats surrounded it to form a kind of stadium. I sat near one of the back walls of the park. From this high position I was afforded a good view of the splashing whales—there were three in the tank—without much concern for getting wet.
Each whale had been assigned a trainer, and was about the business of obeying a number of amicable commands to perform tricks for the crowd. I watched one whale dive to the bottom of the tank, shoot up to the surface like a rocket and do a twist in the air, rostrum smiling, pectoral fins flying. The whale landed on its back. A tremendous splash deluged the front few rows. The crowd cheered, even as large portions of it shivered and dripped.
Indeed the water looked cold. Nor did it shine blue in the sunlight, because there was no sunlight. Heavy gray clouds—vast, undulating curtains of them—floated over the park. At one point I looked up and saw a plane, spinning downward toward a row of city spires in the distance. I didn’t like that. I also didn’t like the way the whales, all three of them, were grinning at the trainers. They were all eyes and teeth, like the cat from that book about the girl who’d no interest in schoolwork, and who’d gotten herself lost between a daydream and a nightmare.
Worse, the trainers behaved as if oblivious to the undercurrent of gloom that hovered about the entire park. Besides dark skies and unsettling smiles, I could see rusty beams supporting the structure beneath us. Flaked, faded signage for the show circled the silver platter surface of the water. Even the trainers’ wet suits looked dated and dull.
One of the female trainers was very small. She had dark skin and long black hair. The hair was tied into a ponytail. Even from my distant vantage point, I somehow knew the trainer was Setti. Setti raised her arm, commanding one of the whales—the largest—to swim up to the ledge. The whale complied. Its limp dorsal fin cut through the water and came to a stop right where it was told. Here my heart skipped a beat as Setti, waving happily to the crowd, put her two small, bare feet onto the orca’s back.
“Now watch, everyone,” another trainer announced through a microphone, “as our lovely Setti goes for a swim with Minaccia!”
Setti knelt to squeeze Minaccia’s back between her knees. Then the whale’s back arced, and took its passenger under.
“The tank is forty feet deep, ladies and gentlemen! And right now, our Setti is holding her breath at the very bottom!”
I heard some gasps from the crowd. Oohs and ahhs. Through the silver surface it was easy enough to make out the orca’s huge black shape. It did indeed seem to be at the bottom. A military submarine, creeping slowly through dark depths. Setti had once told me how long she could hold her breath. I remembered it as being somewhere between sixty and ninety seconds.
Still on the bottom, Minaccia executed a slow turn, then, to my great relief, brought Setti up for air. Her smile was wide and bright as she waved from atop the orca, but I could see her thin chest heaving. She’d been having pain while waiting to be brought up. Tightness in her lungs.
There came another huge cheer from the crowd. Setti barely had time to hear it before Minaccia took her down again. The whale’s enormous fluke rose into sky, twisted, and disappeared in a misty splash.
“Now these incredible animals are very playful!” the other trainer told us. “As you can see, Minaccia really enjoys showing Setti the sights of his domain!”
This time Minaccia did not bring her up so quickly. The whale’s dark shape moved from one end of the tank to the other, and back again, testing Setti’s lung capacity. I counted to forty before the whale deigned to give her a breath. Its rostrum shattered the surface. Next came Setti, still riding on back. Only now she wasn’t smiling. Her mouth hung open, desperate to take in air. I saw her eyes fearfully seek out one of the trainers. She pointed to her chest and jumped off the whale.
The trainer blew his whistle, calling Minaccia to heel. Minaccia disobeyed. He went directly for Setti, who was busy swimming toward the ledge. The crowd gasped again, this time in terror, as the giant orca seized Setti’s foot in his teeth and pulled her down for a third time.
Did she get a deep enough breath before going under? I hoped so. But she was a small lady, and already tired.
“MINA!” one of the trainer’s screamed, as if the whale could here or care. The other trainer had retrieved a bucket of fish and dumped it in the water. Dozens of scaly corpses now bobbed on the surface, though not for very long. Minaccia’s two companions were quick to spot them and conduct a ferocious attack. Water splashed in a frenzy as they ate, though I didn’t pay mind to this spectacle for long.
It was Setti everyone—me and the rest of the crowd—wanted to see. We watched, enraptured, drunken with morbid fascination, as the trainers kept trying to coax their rogue beast to the surface. And then the whale did surface, dragging a screaming Setti across the tank.
“HELP ME!” she got out between ragged breaths. “HELP ME!”
At some point Minaccia had torn open the top of her wet suit. I could see the smooth curves of her bare breasts go flat as she squirmed to get free. The dainty twigs of her ribs and clavicle. She really needed to get some air in that chest. To lie back in the sun and breathe.
But the orca had other plans. He took her under again, this time with her body held in his jaws. And somehow I was able to vacate my seat among the throng, and follow Setti underwater, and watch her fight to hold her breath. Her lips were pursed as if straining to push something too large and too heavy for a dainty girl’s arms. She kicked and writhed. But she could not escape the whale.
Minaccia was a big fish—24 feet from rostrum to fluke. He looked even bigger underwater, amidst spinning coin curtains of hyperactive bubbles. We went back to the surface to give Setti another ride around the perimeter, tearing away further fragments of her wet suit, until at last she was fully naked, fully exposed to the stupefied crowd.
“Deep breath!” somebody yelled savagely. “Get a deep one, little girl!”
I looked at Minaccia...but of course he hadn’t been the one to speak. Or perhaps he had. His grin, clasped over Setti’s body, had become ferocious. The grin of a madman who’d broken out of Bedlam.
And we went under the water with Setti. Ten feet, twenty feet, thirty. At the bottom of the tank the orca disappeared. Or at least I could no longer see it. This despite both sides of our blue domain being quite visible. Port and starboard at the same moment. A huge, serpentine number 35. A long window clustered with horrified faces.
Something bitter sickened my tongue. A pale brackishness spread over some taut, smooth tempera of thrumming panic. That panic made me excited. I soon recognized it as the racing heart of terrified prey—a luxury not afforded to me for years. Life had made a set-piece of me. An extravaganza. A showman for popcorn-eating imbeciles. Now, once more, I retained a fragment of inclemency. In my grasp was a gleaming speck of some halcyon wild I’d once known and lost.
I meant to savor it while it lasted. My jaws closed tighter around Setti’s tiny body.
And I bit into that flower just as she drowned. And but for eyes at the window there was no one around. And I shredded soft petals of crimson and pink. And when I awoke I knew not what to think.
So I called Setti’s number immediately.
It was three in the morning. The condo unit, black and silent, had taken on the strange aura of an underwater cavern. That was just the dream talking, I knew, but I still wished Setti had been able to spend the night. She’d not been afforded the choice. Her dad was feeling sicker than usual this week. She didn’t want to leave him alone.
“Setti?” I said into my cell phone.
The voice on the other end was blurry with sleep. “Who is this?” Then, before I could reply: “Oh my gosh. Fredo?”
“It’s me. Are you all right?”
“What time is it?”
“Around three. Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right.” Her voice changed, became more alert. “Why wouldn’t I be all right?”
“I...I had a terrible dream about you.”
Now she laughed. “How did I die?”
That made me sit up in bed. I looked around the room, then through the doorway into the kitchen. There was nothing untoward to see. No drowning damsels banging desperately on the closet door. No giant killer whales peeking through the balcony window.
“You drowned,” I all but gushed into the receiver. “A whale drowned you. An orca.”
Setti sounded unfazed. “I always die in people’s dreams, Fredo. Don’t worry about it.”
Her casual tone did nothing to disperse the image of the whale, burnt across the screen of my thoughts. I told her how real it all felt. How I could hear the laughter and the screams, smell the popcorn, feel the cold water. My young girlfriend remained stoic. She told me not to fret, and that I would soon forget the dream ever happened. This I supposed to be true, though I couldn’t understand why I had to watch Setti die.
“You didn’t, dummy,” she said. “It was your dream. You were in control.”
“I didn’t know I was asleep.”
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
If she meant that as a rebuke I couldn’t tell. We talked for a few more minutes, cooing affection for each other the way young lovers with all the time in world like to do, until finally I let her go back to sleep. I put my phone down and lay in bed for awhile. Already the image of the killer whale had lost its potency. Talking to Setti, hearing proof of her vitality, had dispelled the illusion, like a breeze upon the ripples of meticulous tapestry. I would see her at work later on. Put my arms around her. Hold her soft hands.
On a whim, I picked up the phone and dialed the number to my mother’s landline in Ohio. To this day I can’t be sure what possessed me. Perhaps it was the need, after such a bizarre dream, to reaffirm the presence of every female I knew. Or maybe Setti’s opinion of the dream (she clearly thought it ridiculous) encouraged me to seek restitution from another’s fancy of dejection. Last time I’d called home, my mother had asked—practically begged—me never to call again. I didn’t want to leave things at that. They were, to borrow Setti’s own insight, ridiculous. But I was soon to be turned away once more.
“The number you have dialed is no longer in service,” a robotic female voice informed, “thank you.”
I blinked at the now dead phone in my hand. In an attempt to shut me out of her world completely, my mother had changed her contact number. The stratagem conjured incredulity. Was she really so convinced that I left home because of family? Did her guilt, manufactured by some fevered notion that my abandonment came not from necessity but from dissatisfaction with the Trentinara tree, truly run so deep? Deep enough, one might say, for a whale to swim in?
So I tried calling my dad. Fortuna, that Roman goddess of great spinning wheels in the stars, could not find it in her heart to disappoint me twice. After three rings the old man picked up. He sounded happy.
“Hello!” his voice beamed.
“Hey, old man. It’s me.”
“Fredo!” he gushed, just as I began to tell him who “me” was. “How the hell are you?”
My dad hadn’t talked to me that way in years. Maybe never at all. Catching him in a cheerful mood was rare—and even when those instances occurred, he tended to express his jocularity not with booming inquiries about my well-being, but with a series of small, quiet smiles that were like reflections of some temporary stillness upon his psyche. Having said as much, I don’t wish to solicit the impression that my father was an angry man. He just wasn’t happy. Hadn’t been since Mom walked out of their marriage one night, way back in some lost, starry grove of my childhood.
I told him that everything was fine here. I told him about our new TV show, and that soon he would be able to see it. “So long as you’re willing to buy a satellite dish,” I finished.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“I have some news of my own, Fredo. You’re never going to believe this.”
“Shoot.”
“Your mom and I are back together.”
I had to fight and overcome my shock quickly so as not to let too much silence draw out on the line. I stammered a few juvenile exclamations—wow and gee and no way. But I was suddenly grateful to have heard the news while lying in bed. Otherwise I may have reeled.
“Dad,” I got out, “you two have been divorced for over twenty years. I—“
“Don’t talk like that!” his snapping voice broke in, killing in one swift stroke the cheerfulness I’d heard moments ago. “Divorce, divorce!”
“Dad?”
“Desecration! Breaking ties! That’s all you ever think about! What’s wrong with you, Fredo?” His voice was disgusted, like that of a nun who’d found porn magazines under a convent orphan’s bed. I realized I’d never truly been able to understand this man very much. At present I couldn’t understand him at all.
“I’m sorry, Dad. This just comes as such a surprise.”
His next words were cooler, though only just. “I bet. You were never one for empathy.”
I had no idea what he meant by this, but elected to let it slide. “Is Mom there? Can I talk to her?”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you, Fredo. I can’t say I blame her.”
A flush of anger rose in my chest. My parents’ neuroticism over this entire relocation ordeal had gone from puzzling, to annoying, to what it suddenly became at present: Downright irritating. “If the two of you are still mad at me for leaving home, then maybe the empathy problem isn’t mine.”
“You need to let us heal, Fredo.”
“Heal from what? Please stop blaming yourselves. I told you a hundred times how much I need this job. One day I’ll come home. I promise you that.”
My father’s next words were cold as the voice of a ghost. Have you, Gentle Reader, ever heard the dead speak? Setti has. She once told me the dead always sounded as if they were in another room of the house, or downstairs in the basement. That’s just the impression my dad gave when he said:
“We’d rather you didn’t.”
He didn’t give time for further rebuke. The line went silent. On my phone’s screen was a message: Call Ended.
I closed the clam shell, placed it on the nightstand. Looking around the room, I could see it had become faintly alight with the stretching limbs of a cloudy gray dawn—one of many during any rainy season in Manila.